The Milwaukee County Board is considering a proposal that would permit your tenants to abate rent for maintenance issues not addressed within 24 hours.

.

For example, your tenant calls on Friday morning to say the bathroom faucet is not working correctly. You go out and fix it on Sunday, 50 hours after the call came in. This proposal would allow that tenant to deduct $200 from the rent – Yes! Under this proposal, the tenant can deduct TWO HUNDRED dollars even though you made a timely repair of a minor item that does not affect health or safety.

There will be a hearing on this proposal at 9:00 AM Monday, July 17th, 2017 at the County Board Committee Hearing Room at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, 901 North 9th Street, RM 201B, Milwaukee, WI 53233 Phone: 414-278-4222. Ironically this is two floors below the eviction courtroom where the legitimacy of each deduction will be decided.

.

I encourage you to attend. If you cannot attend you can still make an impact by reaching out to your County Supervisor and/or County Executive Chris Abele to let them know the potential negative impact of this proposal on both you as the property owner and on your tenants. If you live in one of their districts please make an extra effort to contact your supervisor and attend. Constituents of the supervisors make a bigger impact when in attendance.

Here are some talking points to help you get started when making your call.

How is maintenance even directly related to evictions?

Who will be responsible for verifying maintenance issues? At what cost? In what time frame?

What is the plan if the issues are deemed inaccurate?

Cost of these abatements and the court costs to fight them will be passed on to good tenants

There is a risk of tenants seeing these types of abatements as a means to avoid paying legitimate rent.

This proposed system is just another layer of cost to the city

There are already programs in place to protect tenants through the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS). Why add this? If the current system is not working, why not improve what we have rather than create a new layer of bureaucracy and cost.

Evictions are not a result of non-repair, but a result of non-payment

This proposal will increase evictions, not decrease them.

Many of the tenants featured in the news surrounding the Eviction Defense Project (Milwaukee) are serial evictees. This type of evictee increases the rents of good tenants; repeated court costs, employee time, and loss of rent will cause rents to rise.

.

There are bigger issues to be addressed regarding evictions in Milwaukee. We need to be looking at ways for landlords to be better landlords and tenants to be better tenants. Many want to blame housing for all the problems in our communities. A better approach for both housing and for the tenants that find themselves in eviction would be to look at the underlying cause of the tenant’s failure to pay rent and have both financial assistance and social intervention to make their future tenancies successful. Housing isn’t the problem, it’s part of the solution. The money would be better spent on education, neighborhood programs, and increased police protection.

.

The AASEW applauds efforts to reduce evictions as they are time-consuming and costly for the owners as well as negatively impacting the housing stock and the tenants.

Take action today; contact your supervisor or attend the meeting on Monday (7/17/17).

While Stampler may or may not be a good or bad landlord[1], the problem with this type of reporting is it stigmatizes everyone who is in this very tough business. And it is a hard business. Many a well-funded nonprofit has failed trying to provide housing in lower income markets

So the Baird investment banker takes a public shaming that may be career-ending. An NBA star receives a public shaming that could potentially have forced him out of the league. An alderman takes a public shaming.

This relentless negative press on the industry creates a fear within those of slightly lesser means that if things go even a bit wrong, they will be publicly attacked. What a disincentive for those with adequate resources to invest in the poorer neighborhoods of the city, creating an environment that allows and perhaps even encourages predatory owners into the market due to the vacuum created by the of others unwillingness of others to take the chance.

[1] Stampler responded to the reporter “Put it this way, when she moved into that property it wasn’t like that, okay,”

If the house had rodent problems, broken windows, defective detectors and damaged light fixtures when the tenant moved in shame on Stampler. If the tenant did the damage and lived in a way that contributed to infestations and then blamed Stampler in an attempt to ruin his career, then shame on her.

The home on N 22nd is a single family. If the infestation was not present when she moved in, then the responsibility was that of the tenant under both state statutes, §704.07(3)(a), and Milwaukee ordinances 275-82-3-b. The woman was a landlord herself prior to a handful of foreclosures in 2010.

DNS orders are not always what they appear to be. A defective detector often is one that the tenant simply took the batteries out of. A handrail violation? Many times DNS orders retrofitting of rails to newer standards, contrary to the codes. In DNS terms a defective roof could be an entire failed roof or a single missing tab.

Prior to 1986 Milwaukee’s code and building inspection held tenants responsible for things like removing batteries from detectors, housekeeping and the damage they did. In 1986, File Number 85-1396-a, the Council decided that tenant responsibility was a bad thing. The only recourse owners have now is an eviction or small claims judgments. Judgments on uncollectible defendants are worthless.

Evictions are expensive, and the results are not satisfying despite what the author of Evicted may purport. Not holding tenants accountable for their actions contributes to the decline in housing and neighborhood disorder.

We must return to a system where all parties are responsible for their acts and omissions, not just the landlord.

M.C.O. 275-82-3

b. Occupant’s Responsibility. Every occupant of a structure containing a single occupancy shall be responsible for the extermination of any insects, rodents or other pests on the premises. Every occupant of a structure containing more than one occupancy shall be responsible for extermination within the occupancy whenever the occupancy is the only one infested. Whenever infestation is caused by failure of the owner to maintain a structure in a reasonably rodent-proof or reasonably insect-proof condition, extermination shall be the responsibility of the owner.

Wis. Stats. §704.07

(3) Duty of tenant.

(a) If the premises are damaged, including by an infestation of insects or other pests, due to the acts or inaction of the tenant, the landlord may elect to allow the tenant to remediate or repair the damage and restore the appearance of the premises by redecorating. However, the landlord may elect to undertake the remediation, repair, or redecoration, and in such case the tenant must reimburse the landlord for the reasonable cost thereof; the cost to the landlord is presumed reasonable unless proved otherwise by the tenant.

Homes in Milwaukee’s poorest areas often can be bought for as little as $8,000, with rents running upwards of $500 a month. In virtually no time, landlords can own the properties free and clear and the rent they collect is pure profit — as long as they can collect. As succinctly put by one of the landlords featured in the book, an African-American woman named “Sherrena,” (pseudonyms are used throughout the book) “The ‘hood is good.”

This furthers the misperception that landlording is a “get rich quick” scheme. Sherrena made statements to Desmond that sent up red flags, at least to us in the industry, that she was already in the throes of failure at the time of the interviews.

Attorney Heiner Giese did the research to discover Sherrena’s identity. She was not becoming wealthy on these properties. Instead, Sherrena began losing her buildings to foreclosure shortly after the Desmond interviews and was out of business well before the book was published. Many of her properties have since been razed.

However, Schneider does recognize a fact that is missed by many who look at rental housing and urban issues from the outside

Further, despite the book’s grim portrayal of landlords, one can only imagine how far these neighborhoods could fall if landlords weren’t there to keep at least some semblance of order. If housing laws were to squeeze the amount of money property owners could make on their rental units, they may simply abandon these homes altogether, leaving a lawless landscape devoid of structure.

For the past couple of years, we have sold out both the spring and fall sessions of Attorney Tristan Pettit’s AASEW Landlord Tenant Law Boot Camp.

It looks like we are on track to do the same for the upcoming February 18th, 2017 Boot Camp.

Last fall I waited too long to sign up my new staff members and could not get them in. I signed up three staff people very early for this one. 😉

You may ask ‘Why would Tim pay $537 plus wages to send three people to Boot Camp when he knows the laws so well?’

The answer is easy: One small mistake or missed opportunity will cost us far more than this. It is important that my folks know the law as WI landlord Tenant Law is not always what a reasonable person would assume it to be. And this is ever evolving, with both new laws, new interpretations by courts and new tricks by tenant advocates*. This is not the first time we’ve sent staff either.

This course is presented by Attorney Tristan Pettit. Tristan’s law practice focuses on landlord-tenant law, he is a current board member of the Apartment Association as well as former president, and drumroll please, he writes all the standard landlord tenant forms for Wisconsin Legal Blank.

If you want to go, now that my seats are secure ;-), you can sign up online or call Joy at the Association 414-276-7378 and reserve a spot.

http://www.landlordbootcamp2017.com

* Most “tenant advocates” only advocate for tenants that break the rules. This ultimately costs the rest of the good tenants more in increased rents and decreased service or more noise and disruption… but this is another story for another day.

I spoke to a couple of people that have attended a recent DNS presentation on the new property information system.

At this presentation, the attendees were told that DNS was prevented from collecting contact information, such as phone numbers, through property recording due to ACT 176. This is not accurate but is just more “Fake News” that our industry has been subjected to so much lately.

ACT 176 explicitly permits the collection of the contact information for the authorized contact person for the property. This exclusion was supported by the Apartment Association as most owners find value in having people be able to contact them or the people they have managing their properties so that they may address small problems before they become big problems. We also find it useful to be able to contact other owners during screening.

66.0104 (2) (e) No city, village, town, or county may enact an ordinance that does any of the following:

1. Requires that a rental property or rental unit be inspected except upon a complaint by any person, as part of a program of regularly scheduled inspections conducted in compliance with s. 66.0119, as applicable, or as required under state or federal law

.2. Charges a fee for conducting an inspection of a residential rental property unless all of the following are satisfied:

a. The amount of the fee is uniform for residential rental inspections.b. The fee is charged at the time that the inspection is actually performed.

3. Charges a fee for a subsequent reinspection of a residential rental property that is more than twice the fee charged for an initial reinspection.

4. Except as provided in this subdivision, requires that a rental property or rental unit be certified, registered, or licensed.A city, village, town, or county may require that a rental unit be registered if the registration consists only of providing the name of the owner and an authorized contact person and an address and telephone number at which the contact person may be contacted.

Disclaimer

I am "just a landlord," NOT an attorney or accountant. If you need legal advice, tax advice or have appendicitis, don’t rely on something you read on the internet and do it yourself. Rather, hire a competent professional.